Once a Target of Jokes, the Kansas Wine Industry Is Growing Up

Photo: Dave Sollo (above) started what has become Grace Hill Winery in 2004 with 200 plants. These days, sons Brian and Jeff Sollo head up the operation, which has spread to cover more than 15 acres.

By Stan Finger, The Journal

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Row after row of verdant grapevines cling to rocky terrain sloping into rippling hills stretching as far as the eye can see.

Is it Tuscany? The Mosel? Try the Flint Hills of northeast Kansas.

“People come here to our winery, and they’ve lived in Kansas their whole lives and they look out over the views we have … and they go, ‘I didn’t know that Kansas could look like this,” says David Tegtmeier, founder of Liquid Art Winery, outside of Manhattan. “One of the most rewarding things is blowing people’s minds.”

Once upon a time, Kansas grew more grapes than almost any other state in the country. It was also one of the nation’s largest wine producers. But then Prohibition became law in the Sunflower State, decades before the rest of the nation. In many ways, Kansas winemakers say, the specter of Prohibition lingers.

But a resurgence of wineries is underway in Kansas, and vintners believe the state’s potential is just beginning to be tapped.

“I really think that the only limitations (to what’s possible) are self-imposed,” says Michelle Meyer, who with her father, Les, runs Basehor’s Holy-Field Winery, the oldest bonded winery in Kansas, meaning they have secured insurance to cover the cost of their tax liabilities – a reflection of serious intent to engage in a commercial enterprise. Updated Dec. 2, 2023: Les Meyer was actively involved in the winery for the rest of his life. He died at his home on Nov. 30 at the age of 90.

Adds Maulik Trivedi of Trivedi Wine in Lawrence: “The potential of Kansas is we have not even scratched the surface.”

When Highland Community College in Wamego launched its viticulture program in 2010, there were perhaps a dozen wineries in the state, says Scott Kohl, director of viticulture and enology at the school. That number is nearly 50 now, and several more are slated to open late this year or in 2024.

“It’s definitely growing,” and for numerous reasons, Kohl says.

One of them is the local food movement, which embraces locally made wine and beer.

“Grapes have always been there as part of the Kansas agriculture scene,” says state Sen. Tom Holland, owner of Haven Pointe Winery near Baldwin City and former president of the Kansas Viticulture & Farm Winery Association. “Now we’re able to once again start putting that out there. And make no mistake, we grow some very good wine grapes here in the state.”

Many in the industry believe something even more substantial than the local food movement is helping drive the resurgence.

“There’s almost a generational thing happening,” Kohl says. “A lot of the folks that are opening wineries today, their grandparents were farmers. … They remember going out to grandma and grandpa’s and having a great time in the summer and going out for harvest and being out in the country and away from the city and the hustle and bustle, and a lot of those folks are wanting to get back out to the country.

“You can’t start a wheat or a corn farm with 20 or 30 acres. … But for a vineyard or winery, six, eight, ten, twelve acres, that’s plenty. So you don’t have to break the bank trying to buy all the enormous equipment and sections of land to move out in the country to be a farmer.”

That trend is evident all over the nation, says John Brewer, president of Wyldewood Cellars in Mulvane. There were only about 400 wineries in the United States in 1990, he says, and almost all of them were commercial wineries. Today, there are more than 11,000 wineries around the country, he says, and 85% of them are retirement hobbies.

“There’s nothing wrong with a retirement hobby, but it’s a hobby,” Brewer says.

Wyldewood is the only commercial winery in Kansas, Brewer says, though four others are nearing the threshold for commercial wineries, open at least five days a week for business and making fault-free wines free of odors or tastes that make them unpleasant to drink.

It takes a good 20 years for a talented amateur to learn how to make fault-free wine without outside help, he says.

Up against the world

It’s been more than 15 years since then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius joked at a Democratic fundraiser in the state of Washington, “If you ever see Kansas wine, don’t drink it,” but Sunflower State winemakers still bristle when reminded of that comment.

Even though she meant it as a joke, Sebelius’ appraisal of Kansas wine at the time was not far off the mark, some winemakers concede.

When Jeff Sollo first started at his father’s Grace Hill Winery outside of Whitewater 12 to 15 years ago, “I drank some wines at some conferences that were borderline undrinkable. You don’t find that anymore. But the quality of everything now is at least ‘good’ and a lot of it is ‘pretty darn good.’”

Brewer, the first international wine judge in Kansas, goes a step further.

“Some Kansas wineries make some very good, excellent wines that will stand up against anything in the world,” he says.

Dave and Kathleen Hansen are “steeped in wine,” as he puts it, having taken three-week vacations to France and Italy to visit wineries there and sampling wines all over the United States. They have tried a lot of Kansas wine, he says, and most of it has reinforced the old perception of not being very good.

So when Trivedi opened his winery literally across the street from where the Hansens live in Lawrence and invited them over to try his wine, “we were pretty skeptical” about its quality, Dave Hansen admits.

“Quite honestly, we were shocked at how good it was,” he says. “Like, ‘This isn’t Kansas wine.’”

Trivedi’s ensuing vintages have also been stellar, Hansen says.

“He had a Chardonnay that he ran out of; it was definitely on par with any other Chardonnay we’ve ever had” other than far more expensive French wines, he says.

Kara Rodriguez and her husband have seen Kansas wine evolve and improve as they have sampled numerous labels and vintages over the past several years.

“It’s definitely better than people think,” says the Lawrence resident, “and I think it’s kind of sad that people don’t think of Kansas when they think of wine.”

Kansas winemakers are now winning prestigious competitions. Holy-Field, for instance, has won 19 Jefferson Cups, an invitation-only wine competition featuring wines from across North America.

Wyldewood Cellars has won more than 700 national and international awards and titles in both grape and non-grape categories, Brewer says.

Those successes hint at what’s possible, winemakers say, but for Kansas to reach its potential, several obstacles must be overcome.

The most significant challenge, they say, is simply the state’s late return to winemaking. Betweejon the passage of a statewide ban on alcohol in the early 1880s and the passage of the Kansas Farm Winery Act, which established guidelines for wineries and opened the door for farmers to begin raising grapes for commercial wine, the state went a full century without wineries.

Lost was the expertise that had been cultivated by early winemakers. Gone was the knowledge of which grapes grew well and which ones struggled in various parts of a vastly divergent state. When Les Meyer decided to grow grapes on his farm near Basehor to make wine for personal use a few years after the farm winery act was passed, he had to visit wineries in Missouri to get equipment and answers to his many questions.

He eventually was growing more grapes than he could use or sell, so he opened Holy-Field with his daughter in 1994.

Thirty years may seem like a long time, Sollo and others say, but in many ways Kansas winemaking remains in its infancy. Vintners are still learning which grape varieties grow best in the state and in turn produce the best wine. It takes decades to answer those questions.

“A lot of the famous wine regions around the world, they’re famous because they’ve been around forever and they’ve really figured out what works well there and how to work with what works well there,” Sollo says.

Many regions have the benefit of coastal breezes that moderate the climate, protecting their vinifera grapevines from extended bouts of searing heat and frigid lows. But Kansas is far from those buffers, so vinifera varieties struggle here.

“Cabernet sauvignon has to see almost 100-degree days to create the flavors, but to set the flavors it’s got to cool below 65 at night,” Brewer says. “Here, we get 100-degree temperatures, but we’re lucky to cool off to 80” on those nights.

Numerous grape varieties grow well in Kansas, but they are not household names. In fact, if you want to stump your friends at trivia, just ask them to name the official state wine grapes of Kansas. Yes, there are state grapes: two, in fact.

The red wine grape is chambourcin, the white wine grape, vignoles.

“Just about every winery in Kansas will have one of those on the shelf,” Kohl says. “Especially the chambourcin just grows like gangbusters in Kansas.”

Winemakers have come across several white grapes that thrive in Kansas as well: vidal blanc, Frontenac gris, seyval, and chardonel, to name a few.

But go to almost any liquor store in the state and you will have a hard time finding wines with those names on the labels. The distributors supplying liquor stores have contracts with wineries that produce widely known varieties, such as chardonnays, merlots and cabernets.

“I’m not saying you can’t grow those here,” Holy-Field’s Michelle Meyers says, “but typically you’re not going to grow the volume you need to have” to make it work financially.

Tegtmeier at Liquid Art is determined to defy those odds.

A sixth-generation Kansas farmer who grew up near Seneca close to the Nebraska state line, Tegtmeier used some of his great-great-grandfather’s old equipment to make his first batches of wine as a teenager from grapes he had grown on the farm.

He went off to college, which included course time overseas near Bordeaux in France, where he discovered the soil and climate were much like portions of his home state.

“Some of the most prestigious wineries in the world were right there where I was living and working the soil,” Tegtmeyer says. “The topography was almost identical to the Flint Hills region here in Kansas. The clay limestone soils were key in making the quality of the wine. So why not here?”

He has spent the better part of 15 years developing a multipatented system that allows him to grow cabernet sauvignon and other vinifera varieties in his vineyards. He has more than 100 total acres of grapes on land he has leased on a dozen farms around the eastern part of the state. More than 25 of those acres are devoted to cabernet sauvignon. Getting the vines to survive the Kansas heat was not as much of a challenge as helping them live through the harsh Great Plains winters.

He learned about trunk diseases such as crown gall and cane bores, beetles that gnaw on the vines so

much they become too weak to survive winter’s chill. The higher humidity of eastern Kansas creates an environment that allows fungus to develop on the vines and rapidly kill them, so the canopies that wineries use to protect the plants from birds must be open enough to allow proper air filtration. Wind helps keep moisture from settling onto the grapes.

“I tried to put all our vineyards in locations that are more protected from frost, so we try to put them always on rocky hillsides,” he says. “It’s not the easiest place to grow grapes, but it’s the best place. They like the rock.”

A ‘blank palette’

Kansas is full of microclimates, Brewer says, including six distinct ecological zones. Then there is the vast disparity in average precipitation and soil types. While northeast Kansas vineyards must guard vigilantly against fungus setting in on the vines because of chronic dampness, the southwest corner of the state is semiarid.

That means different varietals will thrive near Cimarron than flourish near Seneca. Kansas winemakers could capitalize on that mosaic of grape varieties by promoting the vast array of wines made in the state, those in the industry say. There has been and continues to be much experimentation with which grapes grow best in different parts of Kansas.

A ‘stronger spirit of cooperation’

After all the experimentation, Holland says, “At some point, Kansas is going to become known for its chambourcins, its vignol blancs, its vignols.”

Winemakers say Kansas could readily support more than 100 wineries scattered across the state. Most of the current wineries are clustered around the Kansas City area because of the population density there and the rocky terrain upon which grapes thrive. Yet wineries could succeed elsewhere in the state, they say, provided they have ready access to a major thoroughfare.

They point to Grace Hill outside of Whitewater and Smoky Hill Vineyards & Winery near Salina as examples. Records show that grapes were being grown in every county in the state in the 1800s.

For Kansas viticulture to thrive, they say, a stronger spirit of cooperation will be  necessary.  Whereas some founding winery owners simply wanted to make wine as a hobby, their children are focusing on how to improve those wines and turn it into a commercially successful business.

A fundamental piece of that effort is the availability of employees, those in the industry say. A challenge for almost any business in the modern era, it is particularly so for wineries. The tasks are specialized and the opportunities to learn them have historically been limited.

“There’s just not a lot of vineyard management you can do from the seat of a tractor, like traditional farming,” Michelle Meyer says. “Managing the canopy and leaf thinning and cluster thinning and all of that – it’s all handwork.

“I am really not interested in the quantity of fruit. I’m interested in the quality of fruit, and the quality of fruit goes directly into the quality of the bottle. And if you don’t manage your vineyard properly, you’re not going to have that.”

At the request of winemakers, Highland has changed its course schedules and class times in recent years to make them more accessible for younger people. The goal is to have an educated and trained workforce that wineries can draw from and help students realize working at a winery could become a career, not just a short-term job.

A sense of cooperation is growing among wineries as well. Instead of seeing one another as competition, Tegtmeier says, wineries are increasingly seeing each other as partners.

“People won’t travel to another state to visit just one winery,” he says. “They want to make it worth the trip” by visiting several.

New places to gather

Kansas currently has three wine trails, all of them in the northeast:

• The Glacial Hills Wine Trail, featuring four wineries near Topeka and Lawrence.
• The Kaw Valley Wine Trail, encompassing16 wineries in the state’s northeast corner.
• The Somerset Wine Trail, featuring four wineries south of Johnson County in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Kohl, Tegtmeier and others have visions of a fourth trail featuring wineries stretching from Manhattan to Wamego. Three new wineries, founded by graduates of Highland’s incubator program, are slated to open soon along Flush Road south of Westmoreland.

One emerging industry trend figures to help wineries in Kansas and the rest of the Great Plains: Young wine drinkers are more interested in finding an affordable, good-tasting wine and less interested in paying extra for well-known labels.

The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which is under the Department of the Treasury, is reviewing an application to establish the first American Viticulture Area in Kansas. The designation tells wine enthusiasts that quality wines are being produced there. California has “hundreds” of such areas, Holland says.

The first potential designation would cover the Kansas River valley and be known as the Kaw Valley AVA. Agritourism is emerging as a notable segment of the Kansas economy, and wineries are well-positioned to play a significant role, those in the industry say.

“People are looking for new places to gather,” says Don Warring, the winemaker at NightHawk Winery, just outside Paola. “Church used to be the place where you did all your socialization,” but younger people are turning away from organized religion and are looking elsewhere for community.

More and more, they gather at nearby wineries on Sunday afternoons to meet friends, listen to live music and maybe have a bite to eat. It ties into the desire to simplify and focus on what really matters that blossomed during the COVID pandemic and has persisted as society moves forward.

A more concerted effort by the state to promote wineries would help, Trivedi and others say. The Grape and Wine Advisory Council was established in 1988, but it had a sundown clause for 2016 and then-Gov. Sam Brownback allowed the council to be shut down. Ever since then, winemakers say, confusion has reigned over where to go to get answers for various questions.

Winemakers would love to see Kansas emulate Missouri, which provides scientific and marketing support for wines produced in the state. The Kansas Department of Agriculture is conducting a winery census, gathering information and generally asking what it can do to help. That is a great start, winemakers say.

Among the toughest people to convince that Kansas wine is improving are Kansans themselves. When Ben Motley first tried selling Kansas wines at his Arrow Cocktail Lounge in Manhattan about seven years ago, “it did not go over very well,” he says. Maybe 1% of his customers ordered a Kansas wine. Today, that number is 10%.

A bigger player?

Along with being a key piece of agritourism, wineries could become bigger players in the future of agriculture in Kansas.

“The farming that we have traditionally done in Kansas is starting to lose its potential, because the land doesn’t produce as much corn and soybeans,” Trivedi says. “There’s not enough water anymore.”

“Grape growing is one of the prime crops for the future, just because the added market value from the grapes to the wine in the bottle is so much larger,” Trivedi says.

A 2021 master’s thesis by Elizabeth Carter Fayers, a Kansas State University graduate student in agricultural economics, showed that grapevines can deliver $1,062 in profit per acre, compared with a profit of $363.73 per acre from irrigated corn.

Her thesis also revealed wine grapes required 9.83 inches of additional water on average in northeast Kansas, compared to 20.76 inches of additional water for irrigated corn. Those figures would be different in drier southwest Kansas, Trivedi says, but grapevines would still require much less water after their first year, once they have established their root systems.

There’s a tremendous local market for grapes, winemakers say.

“We always need more grapes,” Sollo says. “The one thing about the state of Kansas is there’s never enough grapes here.”

According to preliminary figures provided by the Kansas Department of Agriculture, the state has 88 acres of vineyards and about 400 acres of licensed farm wineries. But not every vineyard has been counted yet. Contrast that to records from 1901, which show that 5,000 acres of grapes were being grown around the state – most of the fruit for wineries in other states.

By comparison, California now has more than 600,000 acres of wine grapes. Neighboring Missouri has 1,800 acres of grapes, along with 129 wineries and 10 wine trails.

The lure of grapes only seems to be growing, despite the many challenges it presents. Listening to winemakers talk about their vineyards is like hearing about a partnership, working with nature to coax the best out of the grapes each year. Kansas winemakers are still in the discovery stage of that relationship, but there is no questioning their devotion.

Farming is in the DNA of Kansas, Trivedi says.

“It’s our heritage. It’s in our blood to grow grapes.”

A version of this article appears in the Fall 2023 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

This article first appeared on KLC Journal and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on The Journal with Creative Commons License

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Photo credits: Photo by Jeff Tuttle